Originally published July 20 2005
Researcher explores possibility of using stem cells to alter immune system's disease-fighting abilities
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
With a $13.9 million grant, Caltech president David Baltimore will embark on a research project to explore the possibility of genetically modifying stem cells and programming them to create perfectly designed immune cells to fight various forms of disease throughout life. In theory, the cells could be injected in infancy and offer a better alternative to vaccines, which continually fail to work against diseases like HIV, malaria and cancer.
Imagine being able to do away with vaccines and instead reprogramming the immune system to attack all kinds of disease.
That's the vision of Caltech's president David Baltimore, who won a Nobel Prize in 1975 for his work on virology and cancer, and who now has a US$13.9 million grant to pursue this dream.
The cash has been allocated to daring, innovative projects that aim to beat some of the world's most problematic diseases.
Vaccines work by stimulating the immune system.
But they often use a partial or deactivated form of the disease agent to provoke this response.
Sometimes this results in a very weak immune response that isn't capable of fighting off illness, either because the wrong type of immune cells are kicked into action, or because there simply aren't enough of them to do the job.
These protective agents, which bind onto infected cells and kill them, are produced by stem cells in the bone marrow.
If researchers could genetically modify these stem cells they could be programmed to create perfectly designed immune cells, in great quantity and throughout life.
Ultimately, a single shot in infancy could pre-program the immune system with life-long protection against many diseases.
Gene therapy of bone marrow stem cells has been done in mice, by using a virus to introduce genes into the cells.
Baltimore has begun experiments to see if he can give mice lifelong immunity against cancers using this method, with promising initial results1.
The aim of the Grand Challenge grants, says Klausner, is to attract top basic-research scientists into work on neglected diseases that mainly affect the poor in developing countries.
Other winners include a project to build a credit card-sized electronic device which could diagnose a wide range of diseases from a drop of blood, efforts to boost the nutritional content of staple crops such as rice and bananas, a project to develop edible vaccines that don't need to be refrigerated, and an HIV vaccine designed to better protect women by provoking an immune response directly in the vaginal lining.
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